Guest Contributor, Madison Harosky

Ruth Castillo, Director of the Emory & Henry Library and one of the founders of the Inconspicuous Book Club, invites any and all avid readers to join the club.

“It is open to anybody. You can come if you forgot to read, you can come if it is your first time, you can come if you are a student, faculty or staff. It doesn’t matter who you are or how long you’ve been here, everyone is welcome,” Castillo said.

Currently, the club is finishing up “House of the Spirits” by Isabel Allende and is starting a non-fiction read, “Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado-Perez. This transition period provides a great opportunity for new members to join. “Because of the nature of the book we are reading in March, it is a great one to jump in on,” encouraged Castillo.

The book club is continuing to grow and typically has an average of about ten people at a meeting but Castillo hopes that this number will increase. “What I really want to see happen is that the book club gets so large that we have to split it up and create two clubs,” Castillo said.

The Inconspicuous Book Club was created in December 2020 as a way to get students interested in reading and engaged with each other during the pandemic. “As we all came back to school in the fall, with COVID, it was like we never saw anybody. So after talking with some other professors, we came up with the idea to create an online book club,” Castillo said.

A usual book club meeting involves a group discussion on the emotional and educational aspects of the chapter/section of the book they read the previous week. “At a normal meeting, we always talk about how we felt. Then you know, we start digging more into what we think the author is saying or how we interpreted things,” said Castillo.

The book club reads roughly one book a month which is chosen by the members. “We constantly share different books we are interested in reading and when we started the book club, we made a list and sent out the list to all the members to survey where we should start,” Castillo mentioned.

As the club accepts new members at any time, if any students are interested in joining they can email Castillo at [email protected] to get the meeting link and book of the month. The club meets Wednesday nights at 7:30 on Zoom.